Pages

Saturday, November 9, 2013

"French Kids Eat Everything"

Stumbled across this article, and thought it made many great points about American attitudes towards food. In particular, this:

Take your time, for both cooking and eating. Slow food is happy food.-
“North Americans associate food most with health and least with
pleasure. The French are at the opposite extreme: they are the most
pleasure-oriented and the least health-oriented about food.” And
ironically enough “20 percent of kids in the United States are obese,
but only 3 percent in France.” Now if that doesn’t send a message, I
don’t know what does.

I'd add that Americans need to reorient themselves to what "pleasure" is when it comes to food. There is great pleasure to be had from a well-made meal created from whole ingredients that came from the ground instead of a chemistry lab. We need to re-learn how to appreciate that. (And in my experience, once we do, the highly-processed "foods" aren't quite so pleasurable anymore, so win-win.) Let's stop viewing food as a battle to be won, or a temptation to be vigilantly guarded against. How much would that change?